Unforgiven

Why is Clarence Thomas so angry?

“Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court,” Thomas says, “seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me.”Credit STEVE BRODNER

A touchstone of Clarence Thomas’s career on the Supreme Court has been his hostility to what he calls élites. When the Court, in 2003, upheld the use of racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, Thomas dissented, writing, “All the Law School cares about is its own image among know-it-all elites.” This past June, Thomas joined a majority of his colleagues in rejecting attempts by Seattle and Louisville to maintain diversity in their public schools, and wrote a separate concurring opinion to reflect his scorn for such plans. “Nothing but an interest in classroom aesthetics and a hypersensitivity to elite sensibilities justifies the school districts’ racial balancing programs,” he said. “If our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories.”

This theme is expanded upon in Thomas’s new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son” (Harper; $26.95). In his book, Thomas is clear about whom he blames for the pain of his confirmation hearings, when he had to defend himself against Anita Hill’s accusations. “In one climactic swipe of calumny,” Thomas writes, “America’s elites were arrogantly wreaking havoc on everything my grandparents had worked for and all I’d accomplished in forty-three years of struggle.”

Triumph over the élites, Thomas writes, took faith in God and, especially, courage. This, too, has been a longtime theme for him, and he elaborated upon it in the annual Francis Boyer lecture of the American Enterprise Institute on February 13, 2001. Only two months after Bush v. Gore, the cream of the new Administration, led by Vice-President Dick Cheney, gathered in black-tie to hear the Justice speak at a Washington hotel. Thomas was going to share with them his reflections on “the question of courage in American political life.”

“Too many show timidity today precisely when courage is demanded,” Thomas asserted. He told the group that he had suffered the consequences for speaking out on “a number of sacred policies, such as affirmative action, welfare, school busing.” Those “who challenge accepted wisdom should expect to be treated badly. Nonetheless, they must stand undaunted,” he said, before concluding, “Today, as in the past, we will need a brave ‘civic virtue,’ not a timid civility, to keep our republic. So, this evening, I leave you with the simple exhortation: ‘Be not afraid.’ ”

On this night, in other words, Thomas, while celebrating the courage to speak unpopular truths, was telling some of the most powerful people in the worlds of government, business, and finance precisely what they wanted to hear—that affirmative action was bad, that black people didn’t want or need their help, that government did more harm than good. Be not afraid. Indeed, throughout his judicial career Thomas has, in the name of anti-élitism, shown a distinct solicitude for certain kinds of élites—say, for employers over employees, for government over individuals, for corporations over regulators, and for executioners over the condemned. Thomas’s tender concern for the problems of the powerful reveals itself, in the end, as a form of self-pity.

When President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court, in 1991, the future Justice and his handlers relied on what became known as the “Pin Point strategy” to win his confirmation. They would focus on Thomas’s hardscrabble upbringing in the small Georgia town of Pin Point in order to deflect questions about his political and judicial philosophy. This, too, is the guiding principle of “My Grandfather’s Son.”

Thomas vividly portrays the pain and confusion of his early years. He and his younger brother were born in Pin Point, and their father, known as C, quickly disappeared from the family’s life. Thomas’s mother, who was called Pigeon, struggled to care for her two young sons, first in Pin Point and later in the slums of Savannah, but, ultimately, when Clarence was seven, she took them to live with her father and his wife. All of the two boys’ possessions fit into a pair of grocery bags.

Myers Anderson, Pigeon’s father, made the raising of Clarence and his brother his life’s work. Anderson owned a beat-up old truck and earned a living by running a small delivery service—of firewood, fuel oil, coal, and ice—for black customers in segregated Savannah. On the day the boys moved into his house, Anderson told them, “The damn vacation is over.” The boys had plenty to eat and their own beds—neither of which they had had with their mother—but the man they called Daddy imposed a life of grim discipline. Chores and schoolwork had priority over everything else in the Anderson household, and Myers never wanted to hear any excuses. “Old Man Can’t is dead—I helped bury him,” he would tell his grandsons. Thomas notes, “He never praised us, just as he never hugged us.” Beatings with belt or switch were frequent. Eventually, Thomas writes, Anderson bought a new truck for his business, but he took out the heater. “The warmth, he said, would only make us lazy.”

Anderson, a convert to Roman Catholicism, sent his grandsons to parochial schools and saw that they became altar boys. In 1964, at sixteen, Thomas enrolled in a local seminary as one of two black students. Three years later, after excelling in high school, he moved away from the South for the first time, enrolling at Immaculate Conception Seminary, in northwest Missouri. The plan was for him to continue his studies for the priesthood, and he again did well in his schoolwork, but an event interceded that changed his career plans. Spurred by one of the few other black students, Thomas began to notice that the Catholic Church had said little about persistent racism in America. That silence gnawed at him. On the day that Martin Luther King was shot, he heard a classmate say, “That’s good. I hope the son of a bitch dies.” “His brutal words finished off my vocation—and my youthful innocence about race,” Thomas writes. He soon resolved to leave the seminary.

When Thomas told his grandfather that he was abandoning the priesthood, Anderson threw him out of their house in Savannah, and their relationship never recovered. The confluence of events—the death of King, the reaction at his school, the breach with Daddy—shattered Thomas’s world. “At long last I felt the blind, self-destructive rage that haunted so many of the people I knew,” he writes. “Every southern black had . . . felt the rage that threatened to burn through the masks of meekness and submission behind which we hid our true feelings.” He transferred to Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, but his rage remained.

To this point, Thomas’s memoir comports with a familiar American archetype, that of the determined outsider who, by dint of intelligence and hard work, transcends the meagre circumstances of his birth. It’s how James Gatz became Jay Gatsby. What follows, though, is something different, a story that reflects a precise moment in American history. In each subsequent step of Thomas’s life—at Holy Cross, at Yale Law School, in his career in Washington, first as a staffer for Senator John Danforth and then in the Reagan Administration—Thomas made the most of his opportunities, opportunities he was given, as he more or less acknowledges, because he was black. Thomas came of age at a time when broad swaths of American society thought it was time for African-Americans to be given chances that had been denied to their forebears. To be sure, all that Thomas received in these places was a leg up, and he succeeded each time based on his own skills. Thomas’s career looks like a model of how affirmative action is supposed to work. But that isn’t how Thomas sees it.

Starting in 1968, when he arrived at Holy Cross, as one of the few black students to be admitted, Thomas began a tortured passage between extremes in racial politics. As a college student, Thomas adopted the poses and rhetoric of the Black Power movement—the Afro and the overalls—along with a sense of being among “the aggrieved and the righteous.” Yet even at Holy Cross, he writes, he saw how civil-rights activism led to the admission of unqualified minority students (some of whom flunked out), and he bridled at the mindless separatism implicit in such ideas as a “black corridor” in a dormitory. His reaction is a wild swing in the other direction: his anger at racism became an equally intense resentment of efforts to help African-Americans. “I already knew that the rage with which we lived made it hard for us to think straight,” he writes. “Now I understood for the first time that we were expected to be full of rage. It was our role—but I didn’t want to play it anymore.”

When Thomas went on to Yale Law School, though, his rage grew. The young law student quickly came to resent the fact that he had benefitted from preferential admissions. “As much as it stung to be told that I’d done well in the seminary despite my race, it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it,” he writes. “I was bitter toward the white bigots whom I held responsible for the unjust treatment of blacks, but even more bitter toward those ostensibly unprejudiced whites who pretended to side with black people while using them to further their own political and social ends.” Thomas never explains what Yale did to him that was so terrible. When he didn’t receive the job offers he wanted from law firms, he interpreted the slight as reflecting what “a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference.” He does not consider that, in the early nineteen-seventies, major law firms simply might not have wanted black lawyers—reflecting the very racism that affirmative action was designed to combat. Later, Thomas peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and put it on the frame of his law degree. “I never did change my mind about its value,” he writes.

Again, though, Thomas began his legal career in a series of jobs that, as he says, “bore the taint of racial preference.” Indeed, it seems that he has never had any other kind of job. Danforth, then the attorney general of Missouri, hired him out of Yale as a lawyer on his staff, and after a few years Thomas moved on to the legal department at Monsanto. In 1979, after Danforth was elected to the Senate, he invited Thomas to go with him to Washington. With Ronald Reagan’s election a year later, Thomas received a surprise job offer to join the Administration as the assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education. As at Yale, Thomas knew that the invitation was the result of his race, that he had been “singled out solely because I was black, which I found degrading.” Nevertheless, Thomas took the job and, a year later, when he was thirty-three years old, received a promotion to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Though Thomas doesn’t say so directly, it’s clear that he was given the job because he was black.

For almost eight years, Thomas seems to have done a competent job running the E.E.O.C. Reagan’s people had, in a model demonstration of affirmative action, looked beyond the traditional candidates for leadership positions, and taken a chance on Thomas, and he had done as well as any white executive could have been expected to do. But, as Thomas moved through the hierarchy of Republican Administrations, the paternalism didn’t seem to bother him anymore—or else he found it convenient to pretend that it did not exist. Thomas’s rhetoric against traditional civil-rights dogma became more strident, even as he became an ever more prominent beneficiary of it. In other words, Yale and Reagan treated him the same way, but he hates one and reveres the other. Thomas never acknowledges, much less explains, the contradiction.

This omission becomes even more glaring when Thomas begins to discuss his judicial career. In 1989, he was hardly an obvious candidate for the court of appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is generally regarded as second in importance only to the Supreme Court. Just forty-one years old, Thomas had never tried a case, or argued an appeal, in any federal court, much less in the high-powered D.C. Circuit; the last time Thomas had appeared in any courtroom was when he was a junior attorney in Missouri; he had never produced any scholarly work; his tenure at the E.E.O.C., although respectable, did not mark him as a notable innovator in the federal bureaucracy. He was, in short, a black conservative in an Administration with very few of them. That’s why he got the job.

And that’s also why, in 1991, after Thomas had been a judge for just sixteen months, Bush named him to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. At a press conference in Kennebunkport, when the President introduced Thomas to the nation, Bush said that the young judge was “the best qualified” nominee for the Court—a self-evidently preposterous statement. Indeed, in his book Thomas says, “Even I had my doubts about so extravagant a claim,” so he took it upon himself to ask C. Boyden Gray, Bush’s White House counsel, if he had been picked because he was black. According to Thomas, “Boyden replied that in fact my race had actually worked against me.” Gray said that Bush had originally planned to have Thomas replace Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., but Brennan had quit earlier than expected, in 1990, and Thomas was not yet regarded as ready for the promotion. As Thomas recalls the conversation with Gray, he said that the Bush Administration wanted “to avoid appointing me to what was widely perceived as the court’s ‘black’ seat.” But, of course, that is precisely what Bush did, and it is inconceivable that a young white lawyer who headed a modest federal agency would have been similarly rushed onto the Supreme Court. In the light of this conversation with Gray, though, Thomas declares that his race worked against him as a potential judicial appointee. It is hard to tell whether this is self-delusion or dishonesty.

Throughout much of the book, especially the first half, Thomas paints an unsparing portrait of the way he conducted his personal life. Well into adulthood, he was incapable of managing his financial affairs. In one excruciating scene, which takes place when he was the director of the E.E.O.C., he stands at a rent-a-car counter at Logan Airport, in Boston, while the clerk, after running a check on Thomas’s credit card, is directed to cut it into pieces on the spot. Nor does Thomas make many claims for himself as a husband to his first wife, whom he met at Holy Cross and had separated from before he started at the Department of Education. Most notably, Thomas portrays himself as something close to an alcoholic. From the Ripple wine he drank in his youth to the Scotch and Drambuie he abused as an adult, Thomas frankly admits to using alcohol to deaden the pain and anger that dominated his life. (He writes that he stopped drinking cold turkey during his tenure at the E.E.O.C.) In a brief aside, he admits to discussing pornography while he was a law student.

This candor is in striking contrast to his discussion of Anita Hill. Thomas’s portrait of the woman he calls his “most traitorous adversary” is venomous and implausible. When she became a public figure, Hill was widely portrayed as demure, God-fearing, and politically moderate. According to Thomas, she was none of those things. In his initial interview of her, at the Department of Education, in 1981, he claims, Hill said that she “detested” Ronald Reagan, but Thomas hired her anyway, as a favor to a friend. She followed Thomas to the E.E.O.C., and left in 1983. It was during this period, she later alleged, that Thomas made his unwelcome remarks to her. (“Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” and the like.) Thomas denies these claims, and dismisses the extensive corroborating evidence for them—including the fact that three friends of Hill’s recalled her complaints about him at the time, and that another subordinate of Thomas’s at the E.E.O.C. described similar behavior. But it’s worth noting that many of the incidents took place at a time when Thomas was, by his own admission, drinking heavily, single and dating, and generally in despair about his personal life. By the time Thomas met his second wife, Virginia, in 1986, with whom he has clearly been very happy, Hill had left the agency to teach law at Oral Roberts University (an unlikely destination for someone who was, as Thomas has it, a godless, partisan Democrat). Even on the evidence presented in his own book, Thomas engages in characteristic overstatement when he writes of Hill’s accusations, “I was one of the least likely candidates imaginable for such a charge.”

For Thomas, though, the confirmation hearings served as a metaphor for his larger struggles. “I refused to bow to the superior wisdom of the white liberals who thought they knew what was better for blacks,” he writes. “Since I didn’t know my place, I had to be put down.” Sixteen years later, the hearings remain a fresh wound. At the time, in his own testimony, he memorably called the hearings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” and in his book Thomas expands on the comment: “As a child in the Deep South, I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.” After sixteen years’ reflection, to compare the actions of Anita Hill’s supporters with those of the K.K.K. reflects an inability to draw distinctions, not least because Thomas, unlike most of those targeted by the Klan, won his battle with his pursuers. Apparently, it did not feel that way to him. Thomas writes in his memoir, “Mere confirmation, even to the Supreme Court, seemed pitifully small compensation for what had been done to me.”

“My Grandfather’s Son” scarcely mentions Thomas’s work on the Supreme Court. Before arriving at the Court, he had said little about what kind of Justice he would be; indeed, thanks to the Pin Point strategy, the pre-Anita Hill portion of his confirmation hearings had been close to a farce. Drawing a lesson from Robert Bork’s confirmation hearings, which had taken place four years earlier, Thomas declined to express his views on judicial issues, portraying himself as simply open-minded about matters of constitutional interpretation. (In a well-known exchange with Senator Patrick Leahy, Thomas asserted that he not only had no views about Roe v. Wade but had never in his life discussed the case.) “As for the matter of my judicial philosophy, I didn’t have one—and didn’t want one,” he writes piously, explaining his reluctance to answer the senators’ questions about his views: “A philosophy that is imposed from without instead of arising organically from day-to-day engagement with the law isn’t worth having. Such a philosophy runs the risk of becoming an ideology, and I’d spent much of my adult life shying away from abstract ideological theories that served only to obscure the reality of life as it’s lived.” Almost immediately after arriving on the Court, Thomas began expressing a quite well-honed judicial philosophy—one that reflects the most deeply felt ideology on the Court.

Thomas’s ideology is originalism; that is, he believes that the Constitution should be interpreted in accord with what he sees as the original intent of the framers. Eight months after Thomas joined the Court, in 1992, it issued its famous Casey decision, in which five Justices upheld what they called the “central holding” of Roe v. Wade, and thus preserved some constitutional protection for a woman’s right to abortion. In that case, Thomas joined Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion, which, on the basis of an originalist reading of the Constitution, called for Roe to be overturned. (Thomas had not shared with the Senate Judiciary Committee either his originalism or his hostility to Roe.)

The early alliance with Scalia has long prompted speculation that Thomas merely parrots the views of his fellow-conservative, but that has never been the case. Scalia calls himself a “faint-hearted” originalist, because contemporary conditions sometimes influence his reading of the Constitution. But there is nothing faint-hearted about Thomas’s approach. For example, as long ago as 1995 he was asserting that much of the New Deal, and thus much of the contemporary work of the federal government, was unconstitutional. In a case where a conservative majority of Justices invalidated part of the Gun-Free School Zones Act, which prohibited the possession of fire-arms near schools, Thomas wrote separately to say that the Court had not gone far enough, and indicated his interest in undertaking “a fundamental reexamination of the past 60 years.” Not since the nineteen-thirties had a Supreme Court Justice embraced such a narrow conception of federal powers.

Like most judicial conservatives, Thomas criticizes liberal Justices for using the Constitution to promote their “policy preferences.” But, as Thomas’s book clearly demonstrates, he has sought to enshrine in the Constitution his own policy preferences—the ones he learned from his grandfather.

This is especially true on the question of race. In his testimony at his confirmation hearing, as well as in his book, Thomas boasted about his independent thinking on the subject of race. In a speech to a black lawyers’ group in 1998, he said that he had learned “to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black.” It is true that Thomas lives in isolation from much of the African-American community, and that in his first eight years on the Supreme Court only one of his clerks was black. But no one questions Thomas’s right to think for himself; it is the substance of his ideas that draws criticism.

On the question of race, Thomas has elevated the child-rearing methods of Myers Anderson into a constitutional command. Like Scalia, Thomas believes that the Constitution is “color-blind,” meaning that all government efforts to assist racial minorities—all forms of affirmative action—are unlawful. Thomas opened his dissenting opinion in the Michigan Law School case by quoting words of Frederick Douglass’s that might have been his grandfather’s: “If the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also.” This approach may have much to commend it as a child-rearing technique, but Thomas would make it mandatory. In the same opinion, Thomas dismisses diversity as “a faddish slogan of the cognoscenti,” but it is one that has been endorsed in state houses and school boards whose leaders, unlike Supreme Court Justices, are democratically elected. Thomas pays them no mind. “Old Man Can’t is dead” —so, according to the Justice, says the Constitution.

The Thomas of his memoir—seething, aggrieved, wounded—contrasts with the genial and cheerful Justice who today walks the corridors of the Supreme Court Building. It is true that Thomas maintains a drowsy silence through the Court’s oral arguments; for the term that began in October, 2006, and ended in June, 2007, through scores of cases, Thomas did not ask the lawyers a single question. But he has become comfortable in the job, and, at the age of fifty-nine, plans to serve for many more years.

The tenor of Thomas’s memoir, as well as his judicial record, suggests that he will continue to display his brand of “courage”—that is, to serve the interests of a conservative élite, and hearten Vice-President Cheney and his ideological kin with his exhortation “Be not afraid.” As Thomas has often said, it is a credit to the country that a man from Pin Point can be given the opportunity to serve on the highest court in the land. “As a child, I could not dare dream that I would ever see the Supreme Court, not to mention be nominated to it,” he said on the day he was selected. There is less to celebrate in the way that Thomas has used the opportunity to speak power to truth. ♦

Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002.